Christmas ad accessibility: Barbour

Friday 22nd December – the last weekend is almost here for last minute shopping but before the chaos kicks in, relax have a coffee and we’ll review today’s Christmas advert for Barbour, The snowman and snowdog.

Captions

Like the snowman films the advert has no spoken words and relies on the music and visuals to tell the story, however this year the opening scene does display the text “When snow starts to fall on Christmas Eve magic can happen…”

Captions like this, are still classed as captions but often called open captions. The main concern with open captions is if they fully capture the full message.

Audio description

There is no audio description version of the advert which whilst true to the original snowman story does stop a blind viewer from knowing what is going on.

Transcript

There is no auto transcript created from this as the captions are open captions and not created using YouTube’s editing services, this means relying on the video description for adding a transcript or the website. The YouTube description however is lacking a transcript and whilst the website does talk about the characters it doesn’t detail the story within the advert.

Accessible video player

Barbour website does contain a link to the advert, however it is a link, which is labelled and takes all viewers to YouTube. All of which is fully accessible to keyboard users.

The verdict

Putting all sentiments aside for the Snowman as a story, this is an advert without captions, audio description or a transcript. We need to find a way to bring back childhood favourites in a way that is inclusive to everyone.